Apache Impala (incubating) enables low-latency interactive SQL queries on data stored in HDFS, Amazon S3, Apache Kudu, and Apache HBase. With the availability of the R package implyr on CRAN and GitHub, it’s now possible to query Impala from R using the popular package dplyr.

Cloudera is pleased to announce that Cloudera Enterprise 5.12 is now generally available (GA). The release includes enhancements for running in cloud environments (with broader ADLS support and improved AWS Spot Instance support), usability and productivity improvements for both data science and analytic workloads, as well as performance gains and self-service performance management across a range of workloads.

As usual, there are also a number of quality enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements across the stack.

In late 2016, Ben Lorica of O’Reilly Media declared that “2017 will be the year the data science and big data community engage with AI technologies.” Deep learning on GPUs has pervaded universities and research organizations prior to 2017, but distributed deep learning on CPUs is now beginning to gain widespread adoption in a diverse set of companies and domains. While GPUs provide top-of-the-line performance in numerical computing, CPUs are also becoming more efficient and much of today’s existing hardware already has CPU computing power available in bulk.

Cloudera Data Science Workbench provides data scientists with secure access to enterprise data with Python, R, and Scala. In the previous article, we introduced how to use your favorite Python libraries on an Apache Spark cluster with PySpark. In Python world, data scientists often want to use Python libraries, such as XGBoost, which includes C/C++ extension. This post shows how to solve this problem creating a conda recipe with C extension.